Markdown
In the last page we saw that GitHub had automatically rendered README.MD into
a (reasonable-ish) web page. This is because README.MD was written in a very
simple markup language called markdown.
Markdown is a very simple text language that is a bit like a wiki language, and allows plain text to be easily converted to a richly formatted webpage.
Believe it or not, this entire course and website are written in markdown! And all hosted on GitHub! To see, you can see the raw text for this page here, and the GitHub-rendered version of this page here.
The combination of GitHub and Markdown allows you to easily build wiki-like websites and documentation, and it is now becoming common best practice for software projects on GitHub to have associated documentation and “readme” files written in Markdown.
A good cheat-sheet that describes the possibilities of Markdown is given here.
Exercise
Ensure that your HEAD is attached to the last commit of the master branch using
git checkout master
Create a new file called markdown.MD and experiment with writing some markdown.
When you have written something, add it to the repository, commit the change, and
then push to the GitHub cloud repository, e.g.
git add markdown.MD
git commit -a
git push
Using your web browser, take a look at your markdown.MD rendered in GitHub.